‘New York’ Has Article About What’s-His-Face

Peter Beinart and Israelis on a lonely hilltop.(Christopher Anderson/New York)

It feels extremely difficult to come up with a detached take on Jason Zengerle’s excellent new New Yorkarticle about l’affaire Beinart, and so I won’t try (although in a couple hours I hope to advance a small part of the story, so stay tuned). The article is so much about our world, which is my world (I am quoted in it), that the first time I read it, I suspected I had come down with a Truman Show delusion, in which you believe you are the star of a gigantic reality television show.

But really, it’s a very good piece, full of rich characters, momentous politics, and bickering Jews. I imagine it’s what you will want to spend the morning reading and discussing, and the comments section of this post seem like as good a place as any, so have at it!

And some annotating: here is editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse’s review of The Crisis of Zionism; here is Nextbook Press editor Jonathan Rosen’s; here is Bret Stephens’, in Tablet Magazine. Here is Allison Hoffman’s superb curtain-raiser to the show that Zengerle has superbly closed (?). And here are a few of the posts that made The Scroll feel monomanaical and led me to conclude that, sometimes, life imitates Beinart.

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What Beinart doesn’t understand is that the one value that supersedes all else is the survival of the Jewish people which is far beyond his self-certainty and self-indulgent moral certitude. He should look into the fate of the Amelakites and why they were destroyed which can easily be found in the old testament to gain some insight into the perils that have always faced the Jews from the beginning and what they had to do at times to survive as a people.

I am not an expert on anything, but I am 70 years old and Jewish, and have loved and supported Israel all my life. Listening to Peter Beinart, and reading Peter Beinart, have led me to conclude that he is a spoilt, ambitious child who has never had to live surrounded by true anti-Semitism, by people who believe it is their right to kill Jews and who will do so at the slightest provocation. Israel is surrounded by millions of people who collaborated with the Nazis throughout WWII. Core Islam declares it will never know peace until all Jews are dead. It has told us (how many times does it have to do so?) that it will not ever accept us in the Middle East, and it certainly does not accept us even in the western world where I live. For true Islamists, WWII was about them, the Arabs, about getting rid of every Jew, and that war has not yet ended as far as they are concerned. Hitler lives. Give up the settlements? Only an attention-seeking child could suggest this, because looking at the probable consequences could interfere with his ambition.

Leaving aside Hershl’s odd use of the outdated term “Jewess”: I have to ask: are all Jews whom he disagrees with “self-hating”? And of what relevance are The Daily Worker or Pravda in this context? Or is that just a dash of red-baiting?

With all due respect, I spent decades researching a book on Jewish Conversion in basically German speaking lands with an early section on Spain and Portugal, and despite 1995 published references to part of it, never submitted it for publication because of the all the personal hurt my comments and more importantly some quotations would cause people. But, without citing cases other than Gustav Mahler, Jacques Offenbach, various Dresden ennobled families I will not specify because they have living descendants I find these opportunistic Jews of the right to be the intellectual or moral ancestors of the Tom Friedmans, Peter Beinarts, and too much of English Jewry today. People who turn on their own like Oepidus, and, yes, I think the whether of the Left like Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev or the right like Friedrich Julius Stahl or Rabbi Salomon ha-Levi who became the anti-Semitic Bishop of Burgos, in deed and words these people are contempible.

Agreed. What concerns me more is that O invited him to the White House. He has done more to push traditional Democratic voters in the Republican camp than any Republican since Lincoln!

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